If you want to be depressed about government spending, look no further than the $127.5 million San Diego County’s government funnels to programs that are supposed to help homeless people stay off the streets.

Given the official estimate of 8,900 homeless people in the county, this works out to $14,323 per person, more than enough to rent each a one-bedroom apartment for a year and fund visits from a social worker. Something must be wrong — and it is.

Before I dig into the numbers, I’ll assert that this is not a depressing column. Our neighbors in Utah have very nearly ended chronic homelessness with dramatically less spending by taking a business approach to solving America’s most visible social problem.

San Diego can boast no such overall success. The latest count in 2013 found about 8,900 homeless people living in shelters, vehicles or streets and wooded areas.

The number was down 7.7 percent from 2012, but it was a long way from the “ending homelessness” rhetoric that we hear around election time.

As for spending, that eye-popping figure comes from Dianne Jacob, chairwoman of the county board of supervisors. Last month the U-T’s editorial board asked her about critics who say government doesn’t spend enough on homelessness.

Her answer: the county spent $309 million last year on the homeless or those considered at risk for homelessness. She didn’t mention that cities spend money, too, such as the $1.9 million San Diego is budgeted to spend on shelters this year.

This week Jacob’s office sent me a breakdown of the county’s social spending. It turns out that more than half of the total helped about 65,000 people with food stamps, child welfare and other programs designed to prevent people from becoming homeless.

This leaves $127.5 million in direct spending on the homeless or nearly homeless; a sprawling hodgepodge of programs that serve 15,000 people yet do more to employ support staff than to end homelessness.

One caveat: officials don’t know the total number of people who move in and out of homelessness each year. The estimate of 8,900 actual homeless comes from a snapshot taken on a single night each year in January.

On the other hand, the county’s figure doesn’t capture all the spending on emergency room visits, policing and jail stays.

And officials estimate that 2,472 people met the definition of chronically homeless, a category that costs society far more in resources.

A decade ago, Utah hired a retired businessman named Gordon Walker to run the state’s department of housing and community development. He set a goal of ending chronic homelessness, which was costing the state $20,000 a year for each person.

Today Utah’s count of chronically homeless has dropped 74 percent, with an effective rate of zero projected in 2015. The state’s spending on housing and case management has fallen to $8,000 per person.

And Utah has essentially no chronically homeless veterans, meeting a cherished goal.

“We had no more resources than anyone else,” Walker said Tuesday. “We just started chipping away at the problem, keeping good numbers along the way, and we found that we were saving money. ”